120 Bricks

By Paul Reid

Coach Paul Reid set out to write a memoir for his fellow high school football coaches and the athletes he had coached over the years, but the resulting book contains life lessons of value to anyone who works with or cares about young people and the formation of their character. There is something here of value for educators, parents of players, and hometown fans, as well as those who coach young men and women in any team or individual sport.

From the perspective of 34 years at various levels of the coaching profession, Reid shares intimate personal experiences of leadership on and off the field. He offers a rare insider look at what happens in the locker room between games; the drama and challenges of creating discipline and teamwork; the often unintended consequences of parental involvement; the often perplexing examples of fan behavior, and the delicate balance between academics and athletics.

Unlike many of the books written by former coaches, Reid does not just talk about success stories and the pinnacles of glory, but also describes the difficult moments when real learning, growth and insights take place. He also describes his own personal odyssey from a win at all costs mentality to a paradigm shift towards a systemic approach that balances personal development and preparation for life. He seasons this message with candid observations about growing up in a small town; the nature of true friendships, and the philosophy of competition and rivalry. Some of the stories in this book will make you shake your head, others may bring a tear or a laugh. But, whether you are a budding football coach, the parent of a player, or a true believer in your hometown team, you will come away with a deeper insight of what high school football is really all aboutor should be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493176717

Paul Reid

Paul Reid is an award-winning journalist. In late 2003, Manchester, in failing health, asked him to complete The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm. He lives in North Carolina.

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Copyright © 2014 by Paul Reid.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 02/20/2014

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Contents

1. Legalized Violence

2. Learning The Game

3. Stopping The Trap

4. The Building Years

5. Expecting To Win

6. The End Comes Too Soon

7. A Head Coach As An Assistant

8. Starting From Scratch—Again

9. All In

10. Serendipity

LEGALIZED VIOLENCE

Growing up with Sports

I am not exactly sure when the best time is for someone to write their first book. I am pretty confident that if you attempt this too early in your life, you may not have gathered enough experiences to write about, or you may not completely understand what happened. If you wait too long to write everything down, such as when you retire, this too could prove to be fruitless. There is a good chance you may have forgotten some of the names and many of the details of what truly happened. After taking these factors into account, I have concluded that the best time to capture life and its happenings is on the daily journey of life as you live it. Therefore, I am writing this book now, right after having completed my 34th year of coaching football. Over these years, I coached at all levels leading up to becoming a Head Coach. This included sixteen years coaching youth football and eighteen years coaching at the high school level. Some may call coaching football a job; but I always referred to it as a hobby, and swore the day it became a job I would get out of it.

Coaching was never something I thought much about as a child. I grew up in Midland, Michigan. And our house conveniently backed up to a city park. My childhood took place in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when it seemed every household on the block had kids. At age six, I made five of my current best friends. I have only added four new friends at that level of closeness since that time. I think it goes to show how important your childhood is; and that who friends are helps to define your personality. I once read that your personality is shaped by the time you are five years old. So my experience suggests this is true. My Dad always commented that if you show me your friends I will show you who you are. A couple of times while I was coaching high school ball, I had my Dad come give them a talk. When that happened, he gave them a very similar lesson. One time, he told the kids, If you’re riding in a car with friends and you stop at a convenience store, and all the sudden your buddy comes running out of the store, telling you to drive away fast as he just robbed the store, then you just robbed the store too. Kids often don’t think about the consequences of things like that until they get in a situation. By then, it’s too late. I think maybe I liked football for just that reason: it was a great place to learn life lessons that carry over into the rest of your life.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it seemed everyone liked to play sports. In the evening after school we would play in Gary Park until the sun went down. In the summer we played baseball all day. We played three on three, pitcher’s hand. Today that probably means very little to kids, as they only understand organized ball, and the little parks of the city have given way to the supervised sports field as a place for sports activity. Whatever the season was for the professional sports, we played them at the same time in the park. Not one kid was ever called by his real name; they all had colorful nick names such as Mad dog, Mobster, Splotch, Clipper Green Bean, Scrib, Skin, Roach Clip and Flat Rock. On the weekends the fathers would join us in the park. Then we would play softball or touch football and afterwards have a cookout where we grilled up burgers and corn in the husk. At night we would sit at picnic tables up in someone’s garage and play euchre until midnight. I absolutely loved growing up on that park. Today people watch ESPN highlights on TV for their sports recap. Back then, I used to have the experience of similar highlights every day, as a part of the way we lived and talked with each other. For us, the homerun fence was the three maple trees in left field, and if someone hit the ball into them you could still catch it off the branches. The football field ran perpendicular to the baseball field; and it was at two different elevations. Your receiver may be wide open, but by the time you released the ball; he was down the hill and your perfectly thrown ball was in the arms of a defender. We had to learn to think in multiple dimensions, adding to the challenge of the game.

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Childhood friends

Back in 1972, we only received 3 channels on our TV (CBS, NBC and ABC); so our attention was pretty much focused on whatever was going on at the time in the world. When the Summer Olympics came on TV, we all were drawn into that world together; and we talked and dreamed together about someday being Olympians. We would race our bikes in the street or have boxing competitions—and we always thought we were this close to someone noticing us and asking us to be on the Olympic Team. We may not have been world class athletes. But we were pretty good for the city of Midland; and that is actually pretty good. As I mentioned earlier, the founding fathers of Midland had the wisdom and foresight to set aside dedicated land throughout the City for neighborhoods to have parks for kids to play in. We would challenge other neighborhoods to football games every weekend. As I remember it, there was never one close game as we dominated all challengers. What I remember about this, looking back on it later, is that is our park was not really made up of the greatest athletes. Rather, we had a group of kids who liked each other, and knew how to play together. This idea is something that always stayed with me.

Basketball was a fun sport to play in the winter; we would play at my Dad’s house. Everyone would bring a ball and we would set it inside to stay warm until we needed it. Each ball lasted for about ten minutes before it got so cold it would no longer bounce. Whenever this happened, we would literally throw it back in our kitchen and grab a new ball to play with. My Dad had a long driveway which opened up at the end into a big basketball court. We would shovel the snow off the court, but never off the rest of his driveway. I am sure that angered him every time he saw it.

With all the activities we did, and all the sports we played, you could make a case that Midland, Michigan, was the greatest place to grow up in. It was a community in every sense of the word. And sports were the place where we all came together. It seemed when we played sports that all we thought about was the game. You did not worry if your parents were getting a divorce, or if your Dad was on strike at the local chemical company plant. Life was very simple; and in whatever house you ended up at the end of the day, that is where you ate you next meal.

I grew up with two brothers and two sisters, all of them older than me. My sisters Linda and Brenda are identical twins, and my friends always asked me how I could tell them apart. I liked to tell them that they are only identical until you live with them, and then they are very easy to tell them apart. Twins may look alike; but they don’t always act alike. I have two older brothers, Charlie and Jeff. Each night when my parents went out with friends, I would get a butt-whipping by Jeff. He was three years older than me, and somehow each night we ended up in a fight. Usually it would start very innocently like beating him in ping pong in a closely contested game. I would do a victory dance and then he would proceed to pummel me until I shut up. He seemed to forget that he had beat me thirty-nine games in a row before I finally won one. We used to play this game where he would punt the ball over the split rail fence and I would have to catch it, hurdle the fence, and get past the cherry tree for a touchdown. Usually I was destroyed while hurdling the fence. But once in awhile I would score, which seemed to tick him off. Then I would do a shimmy shake dance, which just made him madder. The biggest beating I ever got was when we were playing Monopoly and he landed on Boardwalk when I had a hotel on it. He refused to pay me, so I threw the dice at him and punched him in the back. He proceeded to drag me around the house in my underwear, and then threw me into a snowdrift in the front yard just wearing underpants. Chuck was much mellower than Jeff, as he was six years older than me. He only beat me once a week, and was a lot more creative about how he did it. He would come home after hanging with his high school buddies and then beat both Jeff and me up. He did things like Indian torture, where he would tap on your sternum until you couldn’t take it anymore or a coco butt, where he would knock his skull into yours.

I never played organized football until I entered the 8th grade. It was an instant love for me, as it had the combination of skill, speed, and legalized violence. If someone hit you really good, you have about 59 chances to hit him back over the course of the game. As I remember it, at first I was a very violent player that lacked respect, responsibility, and discipline. At the time I never really thought much about those three qualities. I just liked to run, hit other kids, and forget about life for awhile. I played outside linebacker on defense and right guard on offense. There is no doubt that I enjoyed the defensive side of the ball more. In the 9th grade I played the same two positions, and ended up the season being the defensive player of the year. After having such instant success, I was sure my future was going to be easy, as I was going to be a college football player and maybe even higher. It is hard to tell a 9th grade kid from the Midwest not to follow his dreams—and football was my dream. Unfortunately, there were three events that changed the rest of my life, and they all happened late in the 9th grade.

The first event happened when I was playing basketball in the driveway. One of the 18-year-old neighborhood kids pushed me; and I landed awkwardly under a bush. I felt my knee pop so I stopped playing. The next day it felt OK. A couple of days later we had a baseball game on a Senior League team and I was shagging fly balls in centerfield. The coach called out to me that he was going to hit one more. I came running in for it, and stepped in a hole. My knee popped again, but this time it was locked up and I could not bend it. They took me to the hospital where they placed it in a brace. I hand torn cartilage. I missed almost the entire season until the last game, when I told the coach it was better and presented him with a forged note from my Doctor. I wrapped the knee with ace wraps and a hockey shin guard and declared myself ready. The coach bought it, and played me as I had hoped. In the very first inning, I hit a ball to left field that went to the fence, so I tried